Principal AI Researcher (Agentic Systems & AI Infrastructure)

About the company Trase Systems is an end-to-end AI platform co-founded in 2023, empowering enterprise leaders to deploy, manage, and optimize AI without complexity or risk. Trase tops the Hugging Face GAIA Leaderboard for Generalized AI Assistants, ahead of Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, and serves mission-critical industries including Healthcare, Oil & Gas, and National Security. About the role As Principal AI Researcher, you will define and drive the long-term research direction for the Trase OS agentic execution platform, powering autonomous systems in regulated environments. This hands-on technical leadership role spans research, systems, and product — owning the full research-to-production lifecycle and translating frontier AI breakthroughs into scalable, enterprise-grade deployments. Responsibilities - Define and evolve the long-term AI/ML research strategy and technical roadmap for Trase OS - Lead large-scale experimentation and prototyping, translating frontier AI research into production-grade systems - Drive original research in agentic systems, multi-agent orchestration, post-training, fine-tuning, and SLM/LLM architectures - Design how models operate within long-lived execution environments including agent workflows, tool use, planning, and memory systems - Establish evaluation methodologies and reliability frameworks for autonomous systems - Drive architecture decisions across orchestration, model serving, routing, inference, and infrastructure governance - Partner with engineering and product teams to operationalize research into deployable enterprise workflows - Build AI systems for regulated environments including secure cloud, on-premise, and air-gapped deployments - Contribute to the AI research community through papers, publications, and conference participation - Serve as senior technical authority and mentor across research, engineering, and product teams Requirements - 12-15+ years of experience in ML, AI systems, or applied AI research at Principal or Distinguished level - Strong research and publication track record at top-tier conferences or influential open-source contributions - Deep expertise in agentic systems, LLMs, multi-agent systems, RL, orchestration infrastructure, or NLP - Hands-on experience with RAG, RLHF, SLMs, fine-tuning, tool integration, memory systems, and human-in-the-loop orchestration - Proven experience building and operating enterprise-grade AI/LLM/agent systems at scale - Strong programming skills in Python and modern ML infrastructure stacks; Java preferred - Experience deploying AI/ML in regulated, constrained, or enterprise environments Nice to have - PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, Systems, or related field - Experience building AI/ML platforms supporting the full model lifecycle - Experience optimizing ML inference or orchestration in real-time, distributed, or resource-constrained environments Benefits & perks - 100% employer-paid comprehensive health care (medical, dental, vision) for you and your family - Paid maternity and paternity leave for 14 weeks at normal pay - Unlimited PTO (with management approval) - Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives - Mental health benefits through Tara Mind - Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement - Opportunities for professional development and continued learning Compensation $250,000-$300,000 base salary. Equity incentives available.